The Red Cross and World War Two

The Red Cross played a very important role in World
War Two with the help they gave to prisoners
of war. The Red Cross worked within the confines that war puts on it - that
the belligerent powers will allow the Red Cross to do its work. If warring
nations do not allow this to happen, then the Red Cross can do little.

During World War
Two, the
belligerent nations in Western Europe allowed the Red Cross to carry out its
work of supporting those who had been taken prisoner. The same was not as true
in the Pacific and Eastern European theatres of war. At the
Changi camp run by
the Japanese in Singapore, on average, a POW received a fraction of one food
parcel sent by the Red Cross in the three-and-a half years that the camp was
open. They also received just one letter per year. The Red Cross was linked to
the Geneva Conventions on how captured personnel should be treated and Japan had
not signed up to this.

The first of these
conventions involved the sick and wounded. The Red Cross established auxiliary
hospitals where they were allowed to and staffed them with Red Cross personnel.
They were neutral and treated anyone caught up in a conflict wherever this was.
It was an international expectation that warring nations would treat Red Cross
personnel in the appropriate manner and that the hospitals were not legitimate
targets. The Red Cross also established convalescent homes to look after the
sick if they needed long term care.

The other convention in
existence at the time involved POW's and their treatment. This convention also
extended to internees held by a warring nation. In 1934, the International Red
Cross had attempted to get all nations to agree to legal safeguards for all
civilians in an area where war had broken out. International powers agreed to
defer agreement on this until 1940. Therefore, when World War Two broke out,
many civilians had no safe-guarded legal rights. The Red Cross never stopped
trying to access those who were arrested, deported or sent into forced labour
but with little success.

Article 79 of the
Convention allowed the Red Cross to pass on information or enquiries about
POW's. These 'letters' were restricted to just 25 words and had to be about
family news only. All messages were sent to the International Red Cross
headquarters in Geneva from where they were sent on to their respective
destinations. By 1945, 24 million messages had been exchanged. The International
Red Cross was also empowered to collect all information they could about POW's -
such as their whereabouts, health etc.

The devastating impact of
Blitzkrieg was first seen with that attack on Poland on September 1st,
1939. In
September alone, the Germans captured 500,000 Polish soldiers in just 22 days.
It fell to the International Red Cross to collate all the information about
these POW's. By the end of the attack on Western Europe in the spring of
1940,
30,000 British troops were POW's along with many more French, Belgium and Dutch
troops. Combined with this was the vast number of refugees that had been a
product of the German attack with families being spilt up. In 1940 alone the
International Red Cross was flooded with enquiries as to the whereabouts and
health of thousands of people. With so many people involved, the work of the
International Red Cross was never ending.

A major test for the Red Cross came when
Greece was occupied in April 1941. Before World
War Two had started Greece imported a third of its food supplies. Now as an
occupied nation it was cut off from all its suppliers. What crops existed in
Greece had been destroyed either in the fighting or by bad weather. As a nation,
Greece seemed to be on the verge of starvation. It is thought that up to 500
children a day died from the effects of malnutrition. The Red Cross got the
agreement of those nations occupying Greece to allow in food supplies and by
March 1942, the first 1,000 tons of grain was landed. The
German government freed up Swedish freighters that had been laid up in ports
since the occupation of Denmark and Norway.
The Germans insisted that a member of the International Red Cross had to be on
board each ship and the British gave a guarantee of free passage in the
Mediterranean Sea. Each boat had a large red cross painted on it and each
freighter was also painted in the colours of Sweden. In Greece itself, the Red
Cross set up food kitchens and produced over 500,000 basins of soup in just two
months.

The Red Cross also paid regular visits
to POW camps. These visits were usually done by trained medical staff who
checked on the prisoners health and accommodation. The quality of food was also
checked. Complaints about the way the POW’s were kept were made to Red Cross
officials who then made those complaints known to the relevant authority.

The Red Cross could only operate in
countries that allowed it to operate. The USSR
had not signed the Geneva Convention. As a result the many Russians who were
taken as POW’s did not receive Red Cross visits. The Red Cross did offer its
services to all belligerents, but the Germans simply had to point out that as
Russia had not signed the Convention, her POW’s were not entitled to Red Cross
support. Hence, they received none and were kept in appalling conditions.

Up until ‘Operation
Barbarossa’, the USSR had failed to respond to appeals by the Red Cross to
set up a delegation in Moscow. After the huge loss of manpower in the initial
stages of Barbarossa, the Soviet government agreed to allow the Red Cross to
help and an office was set up in Ankara. Its task was to find out about Russian
and German POW’s from the conflict on the Eastern Front. In August 1941,
the first list of names of Russian POW’s reached Ankara from the Germans. It
was to be the last. The Germans claimed that as the Russians seemed unwilling to
send them a list, via Ankara, of Germans POW’s, it would also do the same.
This also led to the Germans failing to allow Red Cross visits to the POW camps
that housed Russian prisoners. The Germans argued that as the Russians did not
allow Red Cross visits to German POW’s, it would do likewise with Russian
POW’s.

In Germany, the Red Cross visited every
other nationality that the Germans held – but not Russians. The first time the
Red Cross had formal access to Russian POW’s was in the last few weeks of the
war as Nazi Germany crumbled.

The Red Cross also attempted to help
those in concentration camps. Here, they met with mixed results. Attempts to get
the names of those in the camps met with failure. In 1943,
the Nazis did agree that Red Cross parcels could be sent to named non-Germans in
the concentration camps. Somehow, the Red Cross got hold of a few names and sent
food parcels to these names. Receipts for these parcels were returned to Geneva
– sometimes with as many as a dozen names on each receipt. This method allowed
the Red Cross to collect more and more names. By the time the war ended, the Red
Cross had a list of 105,000 names of people being held in concentration camps
and over 1 million parcels were sent out – even to the death
camps in Poland. As the war came to its
end, to observe what went on in the concentration camps, a Red Cross delegate
stayed in each camp.

In the Far East,
the Red Cross had little joy with the Japanese government. The Japanese
government had signed the Geneva Convention but had not ratified it, so Japan
was not bound by its terms. The Japanese did all it could to hinder the work of
the Red Cross, from failing to inform it of all its POW camps (they named 42
when there were over 100), to delaying or simply failing to issue the necessary
documentation that allowed a camp visit to suspecting Red Cross officials of
being spies. In Borneo, the Red Cross delegate was shot, along with his wife, on
charges of trying to obtain the names of interned civilians.

In August 1942,
the Japanese ordered that no neutral ship, even flying the flag of the Red
Cross, would be allowed in Japanese waters. Clearly this meant that food parcels
for POW’s held in Japan could not be sent. Food parcels were stockpiled in
Vladivostok from September 1943 on, but they remained
there until November 1944 when the Japanese allowed one
ship to transport parcels to Japan. However, how much of this consignment
actually got to POW’s or internees is not known. A second shipment never
occurred as the ship was sunk.

The Japanese put a limit on the number of words a
POW could receive in a letter. The maximum was 25 words that had to be typed in
capital letters. Sending a letter from a POW camp was even more difficult as the
Japanese had little time for POW’s who had surrendered. Such indifference
meant that very little news came from the camps to families and the Red Cross
could do little to change this.

MLA Citation/Reference

"The Red Cross and World War Two". HistoryLearningSite.co.uk. 2014. Web.